Lighter TS Binaries / Subnet Router Issues

Tailscale version 1.18.2
Your operating system & version openwrt r19065

Hello all!
I have hit a rather unfortunate situation. I am attempting to install Tailscale on a consumer-grade router with a very small flash (~15MB) running openWRT and I have been unable to properly install tailscale using the binaries that are currently being distributed via OPKG.

I had eventually got Tailscale running by installing the smaller dependencies via OPKG and running tailscale/tailscaled from a tmpfs. This works, however I have now bumped into an issue with subnet routing where I can access the router home page from another network, but not other hosts on that subnet.

I have used the subnet router functionality before on my home network with a similar router with a larger flash on my same home network and it worked as expected. Of course, this could be an issue with my configuration somewhere and I have followed the troubleshooting advice on the TS website, running ‘tailscale status’ which originally did return an issue with iptables not having the NAT module loaded which I had resolved but the issue persisted. Do you have any ideas/ further testing reccomendations for this?

However I am curious if Tailscale offer any ‘lighter’ binaries of sorts? The build I am running TS of currently is ELF 32-bit LSB executable, MIPS, MIPS32 rel2 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-musl-mipsel-sf.so.1, Go BuildID=1646821405, stripped .

If anyone has any ideas I would be very grateful! Thank you very much.

There is some potential to reduce the size of the binaries by combining /usr/bin/tailscale and /usr/sbin/tailscaled into a single binary. It can reduce the size of both by a reasonable amount: Merge tailscale and tailscaled binaries · Issue #2233 · tailscale/tailscale · GitHub

However it isn’t likely to be enough to fit on a system with 15 MBytes of flash. This is one of the reasons that OpenWRT isn’t supported, the sheer variety of hardware and substantial resource limitations.

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